Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat’s ‘The Wrong Girls’ Costumes Rewrite Stoner-Comedy Style

Warning: spoilers ahead for The Wrong Girls.

In The Wrong Girls, the new stoner comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat, everything looks janky and poorly put-together. For its always-high protagonists, that’s the way they like it. Written and directed by Dylan Meyer (Stewart’s wife), the film revamps the male-dominated buddy comedy by infusing the subgenre with two female—but still canonically foolish—leads.

The Wrong Girls follows broke roommates Frankie (Stewart) and Molly (Shawkat), who live in a state of blissful, bong-wielding best-friendship. In their hotboxed Los Angeles home, everything is cluttered and cramped just so. They mount their TV on the ceiling so they can watch nature documentaries lying down. They devour bizarre concoctions—like blue-cheese-flavored brownies—with insatiable excitement. They’re always vaguely unwashed, and they’re weeks behind on rent. Everyone else might think they’re aimless, but they get each other. And when they ingest a mystery drug that gives them telepathic abilities, this synchronicity reaches new heights.

In theaters now, The Wrong Girls is an ode to being sort of an idiot with your best friend. The film has a warped ’90s effect and a reigning palette of toxic-waste green. Shot through a hazy, textured filter, there’s a nostalgic tactility to Frankie and Molly’s self-made dirtbag universe. (Even the drug that derails their lives arrives in vials of viscous orange goo.) Naturally, their outfits, crafted by costume designer Heidi Bivens, reflect this intentionally off-kilter, lived-in energy.

When coming up with the clothes for The Wrong Girls, Bivens—who is responsible for the fashion in Euphoria and Spring Breakers—looked not to stoner comedies of yore, but instead to feminist punk figures like Kathleen Hanna and off-duty models at fashion week. She didn’t want Frankie and Molly to wear recognizable brands, so most of the costumes were made to look thrifty and well-worn. “I tried to think, like, if these girls were dumpster diving, what would they find?” she tells W.

Stewart’s Frankie, a bleach-blonde Stanford dropout who drives a delivery truck, has a more androgynous sense of style. We see her change from a bright orange jacket for her shift at “Kwik Thingz” to a pair of cutoff denim shorts that get dirtied throughout the film. “She’s, like, annoyed that she has to get dressed,” says Bivens. By contrast, Shawkat’s aspiring chef Molly is a bit more eclectic and femme, favoring patterns like leopard print and mustard-yellow polka dots. Together, they share a childlike love of honoring their imaginations and putting things together by hand. Where Molly mixes toothpaste into her strawberry smoothies, Frankie smokes from her shoddily-engineered contraption, the “Bong-o-Tron.”

As DIY enthusiasts who are decidedly offline (a trait reflected in Stewart and Shawkat, neither of whom have public social media accounts), their clothes are fittingly immune to algorithmic influences. When their home is broken into and burglarized, they quickly whip up a solution: outfits made from Hefty bags and duct tape. “We look high-fashion!” Frankie assures Molly as they prepare to crash a polished, Ivy League party in head-to-toe plastic. The ensembles are an homage to trash-bag dresses in other cult favorites—from the 1980 runaway film Times Square to the 2001 coming-of-age flick Me Without You. “It’s a punk-rock classic,” says Bivens, noting that she also looked to iconic trash-bag designs on the runways of Moschino, Vivienne Westwood, and Balenciaga.

And then there’s that high-octane shade of green—a hue that both Stewart and Shawkat have nodded to on the film’s press tour. It was central to Meyer’s aesthetic vision for the film, says Bivens, and it’s a throughline in the costuming, from Molly’s graphic T-shirt to Frankie’s basketball shorts. For inspiration, she looked to the cartoon frowning face on Mr. Yuk stickers—1970s-era labels intended to warn children of hazardous household products—and the melty, oozing logo of legendary rock band The Cramps. It’s the shade of noxious lab concoctions, but in all its abrasive brightness, it elicits a sticky, slimy sensation that grounds you in a good time.

As the stakes in The Wrong Girls mount through shootouts and car chases, Frankie and Molly never waver from the laid-back vibe of stoned besties just hanging out. Together, their bond is disheveled, chaotic, and retro in its goofiness. Sort of like a dress made from trash bags.